Identity, Labor, Consumerism… What Were China's 37 Most Important Contemporary Artworks of the Past Year Talking About?

Every one of them is bound up with a live social question.

"I have innate artistic talent, I have an admission letter from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, I have a bachelor's degree and a master's degree from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, I have a slender waist, and long legs, I have a happy, wonderful marriage, I have a Beijing hukou, I have a great gallery I work with, I have five properties in and around Beijing, I also have an especially large studio in Beijing, I have taken part in, and will take part in, more heavyweight exhibitions…"

This monologue comes from Cao Yu's work I Have. Over four minutes and 22 seconds of video, the artist, born in 1988, stands under a spotlight and calmly lists her gifts, her achievements and her wealth — 40 items in all, without a flicker of the unease that comes from breaking a verbal taboo or provoking the person watching. As the list goes on, viewers may find themselves asking a question worthy of Erich Fromm: what is she trying to prove by flaunting all these "I have"s? And once you know the work has just won the AAC Art China Award for Young Artist of the Year, a sharper question follows: what sort of people in China are making contemporary art?

In 2005, the art historian Zhu Qingsheng and his team set out to answer that question. The Yearbook of Chinese Contemporary Art ("the Yearbook"), now in its thirteenth straight volume, surveys and collects the year's important works and documents from China's contemporary art world, organized artist by artist. Their center sits in a duplex building in Yannan Garden at Peking University; walk in and you find a small library holding the important documents and exhibition materials of the past decade and more. Beyond Beijing, the team travels the country to photograph major artists' shows, and leans on academic and art institutions in other cities to fill out its record.

Since 2015 the team has also staged the Yearbook of Chinese Contemporary Art Exhibition ("the Yearbook Exhibition") each year at Beijing's Minsheng Art Museum. This is the fourth edition. Thirty-seven works are spread across three floors of galleries, with another 104 presented on a documentation wall. They came out on top of the 3,776 exhibitions and 12,780 works the team surveyed. Selection rests first on countable measures — the standing of the museum that hosted a work, the prizes it won, how much discussion it drew — then on a one-person-one-vote round among the Yearbook's editorial board and professional curators, to catch whatever the numbers missed.

To Zhu Qingsheng and his team, these are the most representative works of Chinese contemporary art of the past year. The state of the field is laid out right here.

Cao Yu's I Have stands at the exhibition's main entrance. Beside it hangs a blown-up ID card: Cao Yu, female, Han, March 15, 1988, No. 8 Huajiadi South Street, Chaoyang District, Beijing, 21XXXX19880315XXXX. A one-inch photo. The artist's torrent of self-advertisement comes to nothing against this bare-bones document; her prized identity as a student of "CAFA" folds down into a cold address.

The flat uniformity of the identity system throws the powerlessness of the figure in the video into relief. Cao Yu thinks her energetic performance for the audience can be read several ways. "The person is me, but I'm a performer, a puppet of a set of values — it doesn't stand for me personally. Ordinary people will usually take it as provocation, as something that stirs up envy and resentment; people who don't care about those things will see my courage; people who are genuinely rich will see poverty," she said.

Like Cao Yu, most Chinese contemporary artists are unknown to the public even after making a name inside the field, even after being invited to the most important international biennials. Much of the time what they meet is bafflement and doubt: what is this "abstract expressionist" work actually trying to say? Is this oddly shaped lump of scrap metal really the "installation" the wall label claims, or just junk?

Happily, the Yearbook Exhibition holds few works that leave visitors muttering, "What is this?" "And what's that?"

On June 9, the opening day, the curators brought in dozens of university student volunteers to explain what each work means. Zhu Qingsheng admits that for many viewers, understanding a piece of contemporary art is still hard. But he suggests judging a work along four lines: does it add anything new to our understanding of "what is art"? Is it done more genuinely than comparable works? Does it take aim at a social problem with unusual sharpness? And if the artist is already famous, is this work different from what came before?

Nearly every work in the show points at a social problem. "Identity" is one keyword — the works tied to it are gathered on the second floor. For visitors, these young artists' "identity" may be no more than a puzzle; for the artists themselves it is a real source of fear and anxiety.

"Desperate Housewife" — that is how Feng Lin, born in 1984, mocks her own identity.

Her work also comes in two parts, setting contradiction and absurdity against each other by contrast, a simple method that still hits hard. One wall holds 77 handmade tablecloths run up on a sewing machine, standing for the endlessly repeated mechanical labor of a housewife's day; the wall facing it holds several posters — in fact a "married woman's photo set" she shot in imitation of the pornographic images on her husband's phone. For each shot, Feng Lin wrote somewhere on her body something her husband had said in his sleep, such as "what time's the meeting."

The one being imitated ends up the imitator. The ironic displacement is deliberately built — but the suspicion, anxiety, fantasy and weariness that fill it are not.

"There are plenty of disheartening things in this world to begin with." That line comes from the introduction to Feng Lin's 2017 solo show. Marriage is surely one of those disheartening things, and what Feng Lin offers in reply is self-mockery — there is no easy way to make peace with it; admitting that reality is full of tedium already takes courage.

At taking one's own identity apart by "substitution," no one is more radical than Hu Yinping.

Her image work Identity took years to finish. The hard part was not shooting the pictures, of course — it was becoming the person in them. In 2012 a friend sent her a photo, saying the woman in it looked a lot like her. She "began studying this woman in a state of intense revulsion", "gradually setting the revulsion down, growing curious, and in her own way studying and imitating the woman's look, making her clothes, putting on weight." In the end she reproduced not only the stranger's facial lines but her expression.

It is like shaping the body itself into a sculpture. Unlike "body-sculpting" that flatters mainstream taste, what Hu Yinping set out to copy is a body people find repellent. She adapts herself, on purpose, to a demeaned identity, and through it gains a psychological tie to a stranger — a state of mind she reconstructs out of the "education by belittlement" she got as a child.

After the "transformation," Hu Yinping went to the police station to take a new ID photo — once the body, the "original," changes, the "copy" must "naturally" be updated in time. That is the rule of our age. Otherwise, how would you answer the philosophical question city administrators care about so much: how do you prove you are you?

"Identity" becomes a person's shackles. To these contemporary artists, even the most seemingly "private" life or relationship is an exchange, a contest, between the self and the world outside. Questioning and wrestling with the self is never only about the self; it points at society.

Zhang Zengzeng, born in 1987, gives startling form to another identity handed down to a person: father and son.

For years Zhang Zengzeng received a steady stream of letters from his father, and never wrote back once. For his generation of Chinese young people, the experience is familiar — the friction between generations, magnified by the gap between city and countryside and by wholly new economic and cultural forms, has left fathers and sons without a shared language. Family ties turn sometimes into fierce conflict, and more often into bitter silence.

Zhang Zengzeng decided to write a reply in a language of his own. The installation, titled Reply Letter, lays out a brewing process: he pulped his father's letters, poured them into bottles and fermented them with microbes into a "wine of severed ties." The microbes used for the fermentation were then grown in larger cultures and transplanted onto the wall, where they form a sentence you can read with the naked eye: "Next year I'm never coming back" — the words he would say at those rare family reunions.

By Zhang Zengzeng's own account, Reply Letter was made so that "even my father, who understands nothing about art, could understand it, and feel the deep guilt in my heart." He told the executive curator, Teng Yuning, that after the work went on view he invited his father to the museum and the two of them drank the "wine of severed ties" together. Nothing on record confirms the story. But there is no doubt that turning the letters into a wordless reply makes for a powerful artistic language no one can copy.

If Zhang Zengzeng's "wine of severed ties" catches the decisive moment when a young city dweller tries to rebuild a relationship with his family and his past, then Miao Ying and Li Tingwei — both also born after 1985 — recreate instead the endlessly repeated boredom of contemporary life. These are two works you can actually lie down on.

Miao Ying's installation Spectacle.gif is made of the following materials: GIF animation, wheelchair, lazy-arm stands, iPad, Tpad, blanket, cushions, waste paper, power strip, tablet charging extension cable, doormat. The scene comes to mind at once: a typical "viewer" slumped in a recliner rebuilt from a wheelchair, ringed by screens of every size and by cables. The screens are joined to the floor by stands from various brands, each of them a "Taobao best seller," and low-resolution emoji and pictures jiggle across them.

At your side there is also a garishly colored blanket printed with a big character for "Like," along with chat stickers reading "eat well," "get rich," "have an iPhone 6+," "emigrate to the US." Besides the blanket, "Like" is printed on the waste paper scattered around the recliner, looking every bit as cheap as the GIFs jiggling on the screens and the knockoff "iPad." This is a media spectacle every visitor knows by heart.

"I wanted to put a blanket over the people who spend all day busy watching screens, taking part in this daily ritual, so they don't catch a chill," Miao Ying said in an interview.

Li Tingwei's work mocks consumerism too. It is a stripped-down living room: a rug, a beanbag sofa, shelves stocked with nutritional supplements, a coffee table, a tablet and a gooseneck phone stand. The most conspicuous piece is a large monitor playing a video the artist shot in imitation of health-product programming. Unlike real supplement ads and food shows, the artist scored her program with "cold, rhythmic background music" — a jab, plainly, at the tricks advertisers use to work up a viewer's appetite to buy.

The work appeared in Li Tingwei's 2017 solo show "Does It Feel Good?" Of the title, Li Tingwei explains that "it's my questioning of the culture of 'self-improvement' that fills more and more of the space around us — or you could say, of 'making yourself feel you're getting better.'" Electronics that upgrade every year and lifestyle advertising keep reinforcing this myth of "improvement," of "getting better." As the title suggests, people are fixated on becoming "better, stronger," and rarely stop to ask whether our lives really have to be ruled by the language of Olympic competition.

Wu Juehui takes up "technology and the human" as well. His method is a neat, simple metaphor: electricity is blood.

He noticed a common experience: for many people hunting anxiously for a charger, or used to carrying a power bank everywhere, charging feels more urgent than a blood transfusion. People depend on their phones so completely that the phone has become a prosthetic limb, and life itself has been wired up.

Hence Electric Blood Bag. Wu Juehui rebuilt off-the-shelf power banks into the shape of IV bags and hung them from a row of "IV stands"; the USB cables running to the "blood bags" hang down like drip lines, ready at any moment, with lights blinking inside the transparent cables to suggest blood on its way in. At the work's original 2017 showing at Today Art Museum, Electric Blood Bag occupied an oppressive room lit by dark-red projections. Wu Juehui called this room the "first-aid station" — when a visitor sat down in a hospital-style chair, held a phone and hooked it to the "blood bag" overhead, that visitor became part of the work, improvising the "patient" Wu Juehui was satirizing.

But when I walked into the dark room on the Minsheng Art Museum's second floor and plugged my phone into the "electric blood bag," hoping to rescue what was left of my battery, nothing happened. The curatorial team told me half the USB cables were broken, and suggested I try another connector.

Like the fragile electronics it serves, the life-extending machine Wu Juehui offers looks none too reliable. At least it is free.

Parody and irony are the usual tools artists reach for when they enter social criticism. Other artists speak more plainly, more provocatively. They do not much believe problems can find a "Zen-style solution," to borrow the Taiwanese artist Chen Chieh-jen's phrase; they believe answers come only through politics, out of which an aesthetics can then grow.

"Your brother has just gone somewhere farther away than the West."

"Your brother is just still on his way back."

That is what "Mother" tells "Sister" in Chen Chieh-jen's film A Field of Non-Field.

A Field of Non-Field tells this story. A brother who survived a suicide attempt does not come home but disappears again. His sister, hearing nothing, keeps asking where he is, and gets back only answers in the manner of Border Town. The point of view shifts, and viewers see that the brother has indeed, as the mother said, been coming and going with people of many identities. But the heavy, dragging rhythm makes them look like a funeral procession; the viewer never learns the purpose of the journey, or when these people will finally get home.

In the language of theory, what Chen Chieh-jen has long cared about is biopolitics. The work he made under the shadow of the Cold War and martial law intimates the system's surveillance and discipline of people; and when Taiwan came out of the Cold War into an age of globalization and neoliberalism, the discipline did not vanish — globalization brought freedom to some, and at the same time locked the dispatched workers known as "Taiwanese laborers" inside an illusory foreign land and a harsh employment order.

In 2008, Chen Chieh-jen's older brother, long out of work, slit his wrists. Chen Chieh-jen recalls that after being revived, his brother "slowly began turning his leaking apartment into a database of texts and images holding every kind of 'heterodox knowledge.' This ever-swelling database filled the whole house in neat order, but for some reason he left one room with no light installed, and let it sit derelict." When Chen Chieh-jen asked why he would not put a light in that room, the answer was: "That belongs to the world of dust."

The "older brother" is projected onto the "brother" in the film, and the hollow field of the title is, naturally, an echo of that dark room.

Wang Bing cares about the conditions of laborers too. The director of West of the Tracks is not an artist in the strict sense, but his video work 15 Hours — it really does run 15 hours — was the only Chinese work at last year's Documenta in Kassel.

What Wang Bing filmed is the shop floor of a children's clothing factory in Huzhou, Zhejiang. The workers there put in 13 hours a day and eat for two — together, nearly twice the opening hours of most museums. Most viewers tire after standing in front of it for a moment. What Wang Bing is pressing on is a contrast in emotional states: what bores the viewer is exactly the garment workers' daily life, which suggests how voiceless they are in mainstream media.

Xu Bing, another long-celebrated contemporary artist, once used a vast set of invented characters (Book from the Sky) to interrogate how culture travels under colonial conditions. His new work Dragonfly Eyes is drawn entirely from surveillance cameras. At first he went to some trouble, pulling personal strings to get surveillance video; later he found he could simply download enormous quantities of round-the-clock footage from a few livestreaming sites.

Xu Bing recut this scrap material, added subtitles and built a storyline about "a woman with plastic surgery getting married": a chase on the expressway, arguments in court, prayers at a temple, the endless chatter of friends and relatives… This is a story "shot first, scripted after," and it shows how an individual life lies exposed to mass surveillance as compound as a dragonfly's eye. It also carries one of Xu Bing's convictions: real life is more absurd and defies logic more than art-making does.

Even the "dragon seal" screening-permit logo at the head of the film is an absurd bit of theater — a film like this could obviously never get a real release license.

This irony aimed at surveillance brings to mind Ge Yulu's performance piece Eye Contact. The CAFA graduate set a ladder up by the roadside, sat on top of it facing a camera, and held eye contact for several hours with whoever was watching the feed at the other end. Where exactly does a person stand in the city? That is Ge Yulu's question.

He is better known, of course, for the Ge Yulu series. In 2013, still a graduate student, he began putting up street signs bearing his own name on roads that had none. In 2014, a "Ge Yulu Road" sign near Baiziwan South Road in Chaoyang District was picked up by mapping software, and "Ge Yulu" was promoted to a commonly used place name. Some saw in it the force of habit, some an individual stepping into public affairs, and others a lapse in city management.

On show at the Yearbook Exhibition, besides the sign itself after its removal, are the traces of people using "Ge Yulu" as an address without a second thought: ride-hailing trip records, courier waybills, map pins, even posters for the museum's own official events.

Some traces the museum cannot collect. In July 2017, the "Ge Yulu Road" sign was taken down and replaced with a "real" sign from the authorities. According to the Beijing Daily, by November 13 that year the city had "screened 1,958 unnamed roads and roads with irregular names out of 23,000 roads, and will complete standardized naming in three batches. The list of the first 309 roads has been published." All of it began with one man naming a road without permission.

The Yearbook's compilers define the "Ge Yulu incident" as "one of the events in the art world with enormous social impact in 2017." Artists rarely get a response this complete — even though four years had passed by then since the project began. Without the viral spread of social media, Baiziwan South Road would have gone on being called "Ge Yulu Road," and not many people would know the artist's name.

Once "famous," Ge Yulu lost his shot at a teaching post at Beijing City University. He was lucky enough to be hired by a video studio in Beijing, and is about to work on a well-known director's new film. Other artists lost far more than they gained in the Beijing of 2017.

Yang Qian probably belongs to the second group. He collected the scrap square steel cut away in demolition work and laid it out in neat rows on a black board 2.4 meters long. The pieces differ in shape and size — perhaps none of them meets building standards any more. In demolition that cuts everything to one measure, their individuality was passed over "without discrimination," leaving only flush cut ends.

Beside Cut Ends is a ladder 10.5 meters long, fitted with its own LED lighting. Its material also comes from scrap steel off a demolition site. The winding ladder leads people up from a low place, but there is nothing at the top — no one knows what is waiting. The meaning of that spatial arrangement needs no explanation.

On another wall, Yang Qian used neon tubing to spell out six Chinese characters: "Wind Blows Through Beijing." Every character is missing a stroke, its shape crooked, belonging to no typeface. In fact Yang Qian walked these characters into being. He used a phone's location software to record the routes he walked through Beijing, then bent the neon tubes to match.

Body, writing and the social reality the work points to fuse into one.

Unlike most art shows, the Yearbook Exhibition presents only one easel painting. "Even installations aren't that common any more," Wang Jingsi, a member of the Yearbook's editorial staff, told QDaily. The artistic language in fashion now is new media. And a new artistic language comes with a new set of questions: we are living in an age soaked in media technology.

"Some people are simply discussing technology: how far can I push it — VR, moving image, that sort of thing. Others are criticizing and reflecting on how people are alienated by media, controlled by the things they made themselves," Wang Jingsi said.

Her other observation is that more artists have gone deeper into self-awareness — "Who am I, really?" "What can define me?" Artists such as Hu Yinping and Cao Yu use radical means to explore "whether a complete definition of identity exists at all" and "how to feel another person's pain in your own body," while Liu Xin, of the MIT Media Lab, chooses to explore outward, using an experiment in weightlessness to show how people can, with technology's help, strike up new exchanges with the world outside.

Open the Yearbook from two years ago and you find the compilers built the chapters around keywords: market, landscape, gender, postcolonialism… Wang Jingsi says this year's Yearbook will play down "special topics" and bring specific questions to the front. "You used to feel there was one trend running through criticism, but now it's one issue after another — you start from individual cases, and the questions they raise scatter further and further."

Many of these questions are not China's alone. Zhu Qingsheng told me about presenting Hu Yinping's Identity in India: "By the end, plenty of people from India's national art history association were wiping away tears. Her compassion for working people, expressed with her own body, and the philosophy of substituting the self away — it's very moving. I like her work a great deal."

At the far end of the exhibition, Zhu Qingsheng and Liu Xin have jointly designed a new-media art lab called "Transfer Station." Zhu Qingsheng will host a series of discussions here on how media and new-media art alienate people, and how they can also be used to restore what is human. The guests for the first conversation are Zhu Qingsheng himself and Rao Yi, a professor at Peking University's School of Life Sciences.

For the moment, Zhu Qingsheng is a professor without a phone. Twenty years after bringing the well-known art history textbook Janson's History of Art into Chinese, he made a trip to Greece "to keep a promise made to his students 20 years ago" — though none of those former students had time to come. In Arcadia, his phone "jumped out of his pocket and dived straight into a river." He jokes that this was "giving Zeus back an apple."

He calls the development of knowledge and spirit a "question of national fortune" that no one person can settle. On the position of contemporary art in China, he points on one hand to the sensitivity built into contemporary art itself, and on the other argues that irresponsible teaching — treating "taking your clothes off and running around" as contemporary art — has badly misled the public.

"You will become the backbone of China's modernization." That is what Zhu Qingsheng told the student volunteers on opening day.

Near closing time I ran into Hu Yinping at the exhibition, and she did not look much like the woman in the photograph on the wall. She has been stepping back out of that identity — first forced on her, later actively chosen — and returning to being an artist, a lover of art, a mother. She hurried off with her rather excited daughter toward the last two galleries — where you find the Taiwanese dispatched-labor question Chen Chieh-jen cares about, Li Ran's sculpture of the 1979 clothing liberation movement, and Liu Xin's "pulled thread" experiment at 32,000 feet.

Cover image: Yang Qian's Wind Blows Through Beijing Banner image: Ge Yulu's Ge Yulu Unless otherwise noted, images in this article are courtesy of Peking University's Center for Visual Studies